First of all: Welcome to FOSSware!

🤔 So, what is this?

Most of you may know Reddit, the self-proclaimed “front-page of the internet”, where one can indeed find communities about any kind of interest imaginable.

There are communities for news, countries, hobbies, kinks, very specific topics and so much more.

FOSSware is intended to be an alternative platform to Reddit to do practically exactly the same: Members of FOSSware may create Communities (subreddits on Reddit), define their own rules for them, add moderators to them, etc.

🤨 Why not use Reddit then?

Well, to say it bluntly… Reddit practically shot itself in the foot. This is gonna be a little technical, but to explain it quickly:

Any interaction between you and Reddit is done through so called API requests. An API is an application programming interface. With any page load in your webbrowser, any button or link clicked, any upload or download, etc. an API request to Reddit is made from your browser or native application you’re using (for instance an application on your mobile device).

Now, here’s the issue: In recent years, Reddit’s offerings in terms of web frontend and mobile applications have been lackluster at best. Users were presented with slow, buggy software that was frustrating to use.

This is one of the many reasons why there are many 3rd party applications that utilize Reddit’s API to create a better experience for members of the Reddit community. These applications include mobile clients, moderation tools and a multitude of bots that can be added to subreddits in order to automate tasks.

Here’s the issue, though: Reddit decided to announce that it’ll disable the API used by 3rd party software in July, practically rendering all 3rd party clients and other software that interacts with Reddit, useless.

In order to keep 3rd party software working as right now, developers would have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to Reddit. Users of the most popular clients for Reddit would cause API request that’d cost developers many millions (yes, MILLIONS) of dollars each year.

🤐 We don’t like to be restricted

No matter what the exact reason for removing 3rd party access is, we at FOSSware don’t like to be restricted. We’re a group of enthusiasts that loves FOSS.

FOSS is free and open source software. Not necessarily “free” as in “free beer”, but “free” as in “freedom”, not meant to restrict you in any way. Also “free” as in you may do whatever you want with it, be it to modify and redistribute it, etc.

So, if you’re looking to create a community in a space that doesn’t restrict you, you’re welcome here. Please keep in mind that there are sitewide rules and laws that have to be followed, though.

We don’t like censorship and we’re all about freedom of speech and expression. However, freedom of speech is often misunderstood. We don’t want groups of people hating on other groups or individuals here. This is not another safe haven for racist people!

❤️ Sounds great - But do Communities have to be about FOSS?

No. ✌️ You can create communities for anything you like, as long as it follows site-wide rules and doesn’t break German and EU laws, as FOSSware is hosted in Germany.

🤝 About Federation

You may or may not have heard about things like Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, PeerTube, KBin, Lemmy, etc. These fabulous pieces of software speak the same language: ActivityPub.

ActivityPub basically allows members from one community running one software to interact and subscribe to members of another community with relative ease.

FOSSware is using Lemmy, which is able to utilize ActivityPub, so members could interact with other communities that use - for instance - KBin. This also works the other way around.

So in the end, it doesn’t matter so much where you register an account. You may also just register an account on any other instance on the Fediverse and interact with members here.

You may do as you please, as YOU are in control.

🖐️ Can you add feature XYZ? Feature ABC isn’t working!

We’re using Lemmy, a free and open source software. It’s still in development, so feature and stability parity with Reddit is far away.

If you found something that doesn’t work as intended, please make a post in the /c/fossware_support Magazine if you believe the issue is with this very instance of Lemmy. If you want to make a feature request or report an issue with Lemmy itself, head over to their GitHub repository and create an issue. Same goes for developers who might want to add something to Lemmy.

An important thing to remember is that FOSS is often created by regular people like you and I in their spare time. So please don’t push the developers or instance admins.

If you’d like to support FOSSware: There will be means of doing so later on. But don’t worry about that just yet. Thank you!

💭 Any thoughts?

Just comment below or create new posts!